by Mark Colvin
The noise signalled the arrival of the Hezbollahi. No-one knows whether this group actually contains any students. It certainly includes teenagers and old men in its raiding parties. But what’s not in any doubt is its capacity for violent action against the left. And apparently the Hezbollahi were not only outside the gates. A small group of them had also infiltrated the headquarters beforehand. Within minutes, people were reeling into the office where we sat, bleeding heavily from the head. One man was carried through on a stretcher with a saline drip in his arm. Our hosts raided their store of bayonets for the defence effort. The weapons used included clubs, knives, rocks, crowbars and sticks, but no guns were fired at this stage.
Here I recorded a piece on the scene: ‘I can see this man being dragged through the crowd, he’s being beaten about the head, people using metal bars, a woman being dragged off. [Confused shouting] Incredible scenes.’ It took more than half an hour before the coast was clear. It was all part of a bigger battle that would end that evening when Islamic fundamentalists—Ayatollah loyalists—claimed control of the university.
Les and I emerged shaken from that situation. The besieging forces had come very close indeed before being beaten back, and the fact that our hosts had been so frightened for our safety, more than our own immediate awareness of the danger, struck home. It was clear, among other things, that they themselves felt they’d lost face by putting us in peril, and they made sure to get in touch to let us obtain the interview that the siege had so rudely interrupted.
So the next day we were back on the (theoretically closed) campus, looking for the Mujahideen and the Fedayeen. The AM tape tells the story:
At a secretly arranged rendezvous, the anonymous [Fedayeen] spokesman claimed that his group and the Mujahideen now had sufficient military power to take over. However, he admitted that their political base was inadequate to the task. He said both groups had made the mistake under the Shah of concentrating too much on guerrilla warfare and too little on ‘political education’. As a consequence, he said, the revolution had been hijacked by the clergy. And his certainty of eventual victory was matched only by his contempt for the political ability of the Mullahs: Spokesman: They proved to be unable to solve the economic problems. The prices are going higher and higher with every day that passes. They haven’t even food material and they haven’t the money to buy it. And as I told you this situation is deteriorating with every day that passes.
Me: But there will be a second revolution?
Spokesman: Sure, sure.
Me: Is there anything that could stop it?
Spokesman: It’s inevitable and nothing can stop it. It’s inevitable because no such problems as housing, as inflation, as unemployment … have been solved.
Me: How long before the second revolution will come?’
Spokesman: One cannot say, but I think … less than one year. Because I told you, military speaking we are in a position now to stand against them.
Me: When the revolution comes will it be a very quick one, or will it be very bloody and long-drawn-out?
Spokesman: I think it will be bloody and long.
In retrospect, it’s too easy to think of the Fedayeen spokesman’s bravado as mere wishful thinking, with its Marxist assumption of the ‘inevitability’ of history. Historical inevitabilism has a nasty habit of being tripped up by unforeseen events. But to be fair, at the time, the revolution was genuinely under threat. The situation was extremely fragile. The foreign minister, Sadeq Qotbzadeh, was making frequent visits to our hotel to try to persuade the foreign press that things were not as bad as they seemed, but things were spiralling downwards.
They might have continued to do so, but that Wednesday no-one foresaw that the next day something would happen that would change everything: it would make the melting away of opposition to the Revolutionary Government inevitable, and cement in place the implacable hostility between the USA and Iran that had begun with the invasion of the embassy and the hostage taking—hostility that would continue for three and a half decades.
President Carter sent in an invasion force.
Chapter 5
Eagle Claw
EAGLE CLAW’, WE now know, was the codename for the secret operation mounted by President Carter, who was panicked by the mounting media pressure as the US embassy crisis dragged on, and under constant attack from the increasingly popular Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan. The only thing that really worked about it, though, was the secrecy. There was no indication among any of our Tehran contacts, or those of any colleagues that I met then or afterwards, that the hostage rescue attempt was coming. Iran, though churning with revolutionary upheaval, was not braced for this.
The Americans mounted their attack on a Thursday, 24 April. From aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, they sent a helicopter force, backed by C-130 refuelling planes and more planes flying in with highly trained Delta Force commandos, to Desert One, a remote site in the Dasht-e Kavir desert. The plan was to fly onwards, on the Friday, to a site about 50 kilometres out of Tehran, then drive in trucks to the embassy, break in, free the hostages, and ‘exfiltrate’ them to the waiting helicopters that would fly them back out.
Even on paper, and without the benefit of hindsight, the operation looks ambitious, not to say crazy. As it was, it never got beyond Desert One, and probably never would have: the planners hadn’t even calculated that the landing site was on a bus route, let alone that a bus would come along in the middle of their landings and they’d be faced with a coachload of eyewitnesses. Nor had they noted that April is dust storm season in the Dasht-e Kavir: some of the helicopters had even had the dust-protection removed from their engines to lighten their load and give greater range.
For the American military, it was an utter catastrophe. For President Carter, it was effectively the end of his hopes of a second term in the White House. It was the moment, we can see now, that ushered in the Reagan era, for better or worse.
There was indeed a dust storm, a bad one, which reduced visibility so much that one of the helicopters crash-landed and another was too badly damaged to continue. The commander cancelled the mission, but before the remaining helicopters could take off, there was a collision, in the swirling curtain of sand, between one of them and one of the C-130s. Both caught fire, leaving a tangle of twisted metal, rotors and rivulets of molten aluminium on the ground. The rescue force took off in the remaining transport plane, in such a hurry that they failed to blow up all the helicopters, leaving them, their arms, ammunition and comms equipment as an unwitting donation to the Iranian Revolutionary Air Force.
That was on the Thursday afternoon and evening, and even later that night, such was the remoteness of the site, the news did not break. All unknowing, Les and I loaded our equipment into a van at 6 a.m. the next morning. We were heading out to film a story we never did manage to complete: a platoon of young revolutionary women being trained at a firing range in the use of automatic rifles. We were going to talk to these veiled zealots, watch them drill and fire their guns, and hear—I suspected—the usual lines about the importance of combatting the Great Satan.
At 6.30 a.m., we arrived at the apartment of our stringer, translator and guide, Roger Cooper. A quietly spoken, scholarly Englishman who lived in a delightful old Tehran apartment full of carpets and Iranian artworks, Roger would later become world-famous as an alleged spy. He was to serve five years in appalling conditions in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison after a show trial in which he was denied a lawyer, and the judge, a mullah, told him before the proceedings even started that he would be found guilty. Roger was a man of great sangfroid—when he was finally released and returned to Britain, he told the waiting press: ‘Anyone like me who has been educated at an English public school and then served in the ranks of the British Army is quite at home in a Third World prison.’
But that Friday morning, the stiff upper lip was not in evidence. Roger was waiting for us in some panic: ‘What are you doing here? Haven’t you
heard the news?’ No, I said, I hadn’t had time to tune my short-wave radio in to the BBC World Service before we left. ‘You probably shouldn’t have come,’ he said. ‘It may not be safe to look even remotely American on the streets of Tehran today. The Americans have sent in a rescue force. It’s been on the BBC and Iranian radio. It failed disastrously, but there’s absolutely no telling how the crowds will react. Don’t forget, it’s just coming up to Friday prayers. You should get back to the hotel. Even there, there’s no guarantee you’ll be safe.’
Roger had lived in Iran, on and off, since 1958. I knew, from talking to him often on the phone while taking his freelance radio pieces, that he was a level-headed and extremely experienced observer, not in the least given to hysteria in these matters. Our shoot with the women revolutionaries was definitely off for the day. More to the point, would we survive till the next day?
Les and I got back to the Intercontinental to find the place in turmoil, with milling journalists swapping rumours and trying to assess the situation. The consensus was that no-one was going anywhere till the end of Friday prayers: as we’d driven back to the hotel, sitting low in our seats so as not to draw attention, we’d seen vast crowds moving through the streets to hear the Ayatollahs’ sermons. The question was how the clerics would react. Would they whip the crowd up into an anti-American frenzy, recalling the fervour of the year before in the immediate wake of Khomeini’s return? Or would they take a more moderate stance?
The NBC guys had some of their Iranian staff out on the street, and by the end of the morning we were fairly sure that it was the latter: the sermons had all been along the lines of ‘Our glorious Revolution has survived, Allah has seen to it that the American Satan has been repelled once again. Allah o Akbar. Go back to your homes and rejoice.’ But while this was a relief, the hotel—and the city—were still pullulating with rumours, chief among them that the Americans were now going to attempt a second mission. Such was the atmosphere of fear that this idea had really taken hold, and a number of old Iran hands told me that, should it happen, the Intercontinental would certainly be besieged again.
It was at this point—and I’ve never told this story before—that I was sufficiently panicked to do something I regard in retrospect as insane. I rang my father. That sounds normal enough, until you factor in my father’s job. He was then head of station for the SIS at the British embassy in Washington. This was—is—Britain’s chief on-the-ground connection with the CIA.
As a matter of personal principle as a journalist, I had never before asked my father to use his position as a senior intelligence officer to help me with anything, and never did again. It still leaves me with an obscure sense of guilt. But I was really scared. Really, really scared. So I put a call through to his home number, and we had a chat.
It started innocuously enough: ‘Hullo, Polo’ (his nickname for me). ‘Are you all right?’ I had some naive idea that if we just had a longish chat, maybe whoever else was listening would think it was only a father–son catch-up. So I told him quite a lot about the stories I’d been covering and the things I’d seen. Being an old-line Cold Warrior, he was particularly interested in the Moscow-backed Tudeh Party, and was quite surprised when I told him it now seemed irrelevant, having been superseded by more-Islam-oriented Marxist groups. Then we talked a bit—obviously—about the failed raid, which was massive world news by now, and I mentioned that there was an increasing conviction that another raid was in preparation. I can’t remember how I phrased it, but since his job was officially ‘counsellor’ (political) I asked carefully if any of his ‘political connections’ might know the truth of the matter. I do remember emphasising that I was very frightened indeed. Amazingly, considering what must have been his certain knowledge that the phones were tapped, he rang me back about two hours later and told me basically to relax: there was not going to be a second raid.
He once told me it was the maddest thing (in professional terms) he’d ever done. But mulling it over since, I’ve sometimes wondered whether, just perhaps, he may have been using the connection to pass a message to the Iranians: it was certainly the sort of oblique way he worked, so it’s not impossible. All I can tell you is that it gave me a sense of extreme relief, and the ability to tell Les that we could probably, in the next day or so, get back out in the streets.
* * *
I think it was two days after the aborted hostage rescue that someone from the BBC gave us the word that some reporters were about to be let into the US embassy. It seemed unlikely, more like a rumour than a genuine tip. No journalist had been inside since the hostages had been imprisoned there five months before. Still, we did as we were told. Along with a dozen other journalists, we waited by a side gate in the high walls of the sprawling diplomatic enclosure. More press trickled in over the next hour, as we speculated among ourselves about how long we’d all wait before deciding it was a hoax and going back to base. But eventually the gate did open, and we were ushered into the giant embassy compound.
We were led to a wide quadrangle, bounded by more high walls and the imposing central embassy building. Looking up, we could see Revolutionary Guards prowling the parapets, staring down at us with their automatic rifles at the ready. In the middle of the square, someone had put out about forty chairs in front of a dais set with several more chairs and a microphone.
It was cloudy but oppressively hot: probably well over 30 degrees Celsius, with Tehran’s customary pall of smog. We’d been waiting outside for a long time already; now we had to wait some more. Our questions—Were the hostages still in the embassy? Or had they been moved after the siege?—were brusquely rebuffed. We could be silent, they said, or talk among ourselves, but there would be no information until Ayatollah Khalkhali arrived.
Described in his 2003 London Daily Telegraph obituary as ‘a small, rotund man with a pointed beard, kindly smile, and a high-pitched giggle’, Khalkhali was better known to Iranians at the time as the ‘Hanging Judge’ for his enthusiastic embrace of the death penalty. Appointed by Khomeini to head the new Revolutionary Courts, he set about his task with relish. In Kurdistan, for instance, he was known for having tried, sentenced and executed up to sixty people a day. He made this task easier for himself by inventing a concept called ‘obvious guilt’. As the phrase implies, this meant that you could be ‘presumed guilty’ if the judge decided before your trial that you’d done whatever you were accused of.
Khalkhali’s was also a name I’d heard before, mainly because one of the NBC producers had told me he was nicknamed ‘The Cat Strangler’. The reason was that, allegedly, in footage never aired for reasons of taste, he had replied to the interview question ‘What would you do if the Shah came into this room right now?’ by picking up the cat on his lap and breaking its neck.
And we were soon to discover—to paraphrase a joke made by the late Christopher Hitchens—Ayatollah Khalkhali was ‘not as nice as he sounds’.
About an hour ticked by in the broiling heat. Every reporter there knew that we had, at the very least, one story: we were the first journalists allowed into the US embassy since the start of the siege. But in those pre-mobile phone, pre-laptop days, we couldn’t file it. We were thirsty, hot, headachy with the heat and increasingly impatient. On the other hand, with all those guns pointing at us, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait.
Eventually Khalkhali swept across the gravel, dark-robed, turbanned and accompanied by a phalanx of Revolutionary Guards, apparently his permanent protection corps. He took the microphone and began a lengthy rant in Farsi. Various translators started trying to interpret as he declaimed, but the armed minders quickly went around silencing them. So we were in the surreal situation of having to listen to a half-hour speech in a language most of us didn’t understand before we could get even a summary of what was being said. For the first ten minutes or so, this was just frustrating. But then the lack of translation became, if anything, an intensifier of the drama.
Behind the dais was a myster
iously shaped object, or collection of objects, covered in tarpaulin. Pausing in his speech, Khalkhali ordered his bodyguard to remove the tarpaulin, revealing a number of wooden packing crates piled on top of each other. He then directed the men to start opening them.
The first thing that hit you when the wood started splintering and the nails came out was the smell. It was hard not to retch. As the guards started pulling out unidentifiable blackened objects, and Khalkhali’s rant continued, our nostrils filled with the scent of rotting, cooked human flesh.
It took a little time to sink in. What we were seeing was the desecration of corpses, the flaunting for the cameras of the hideously charred bodies of the US servicemen who had died in the conflagration in the Dasht-e Kavir. I still couldn’t quite believe what was happening until Khalkhali brandished one blackened stick-like object, about half a metre long. One of his guards gave him what was either a bayonet or a large hunting knife and he started hacking at the charcoal surface. As he scraped away, he revealed what was recognisably an aviator watch. This was a man’s arm he was holding, a man who had been alive a couple of days before.
It was certainly the worst thing I’d seen to that point in my life, and to this day, along with that unforgettable stench, it remains in my memory, as indelible as a brand.
Chapter 6
An Actual War
THE SPIRIT IN Tehran now was not just angry, or defiant of the USA, it was overweening. Intensifying international sanctions meant that the problems with the economy would not go away. By September that year, in fact, Iran would reach such a parlous state that Saddam Hussein was emboldened to invade, starting a hideous trench and artillery war between Iran and Iraq that would last until 1988. But the stories we had been pursuing, about dissent from and opposition to the revolution, now had been clearly rendered obsolete. There’s nothing like a renewed foreign threat, like the American desert raid, to bring the populace behind a populist government. The opposition groups we’d been speaking to lay low or melted away.